“That is the most mad scientist thing anyone has ever said,” your character, Katherine Patterson, proclaims towards the end of Torn. She’s not wrong; from the physics-defying puzzles to the flustered confines of the mansion you explore, Torn itself seems born from the mind of crazed geniuses. Like all such inventions, though, it straddles a difficult line between ground-breaking and frustrating.

Torn is a puzzle game that takes you on a trip of continuous discovery. It’s a delightful tour of the endearingly barmy, eagerly ushering you from one room of its enormous mansion to the next as you pick up the pieces of Dr. Lawrence Talbot, a physicist that once managed to lose himself in his own mind and has been awaiting rescue ever since. Patterson is reluctant to help out, but the promise of personal gain pulls both her and yourself through the sprawling complex, connecting power circuits that allow you to temporarily visit Talbot’s twisted domain, restore some of his memories and learn how to bring him back to the real world.

Trying to keep up with Talbot’s memories, which are given physical form as a fairy-like floating light, is half the fun. He excitedly whisks from one set-piece to another, filling in the blanks about the portraits and paperwork that litter the rooms of the house and infecting you with his contagious enthusiasm. Torn has one of VR’s most authentic, lived-in environments and it steals the show. Each room is a fascinating new story waiting to be told, be it the reveal of a nursery in a house with no children, or simply a foyer that’s succumbed to the absurdly-large wires that snake around the building. Thick plumes of smoke will rise when you strike a couch with an object and items holding hidden memories will twitch and bounce with life when you highlight them. I’ve rarely been so intrigued to learn about every nook and cranny of the world I’m exploring.

Puzzles only fuel that intrigue. They don’t so much engage your brain as your curiosity, getting you to uncover wires buried beneath the surfaces of every room that form a circuit. You complete each circuit by locating symbols attached to objects around the room that correspond to the missing pieces of the wires, then use a gravity tool to put them in place.

It gets bonkers quickly as grandfather clocks are fastened halfway up walls and irons are stuck to ceilings. For the most part I was so entertained by how bizarre all of this was that it didn’t matter to me that each puzzle was essentially just following a list of instructions rather than actually challenging you in any way. The last 30 minutes, which ditch the circuitry-solving, are essentially just exploiting you as free labor.

A handful of these trials do trust you to solve them for yourself, though, and they’re good enough to make you want more of them. I wish developer Aspyr had put a little more faith in its generous hints system — which every VR puzzle game needs —

For today’s livestream we’re doing something a little special. Instead of streaming in the afternoon like usual, we’re going live tonight specifically for the launch of Firewall Zero Hour! The servers go live this evening at 9PM PT (midnight on the east coast in the US) and we will be locked and loaded with our PS Aim controller, ready to go. This is shaping up to be a big launch for the VR community.

We’ll be livestreaming Firewall Zero Hour on PSVR today using the PS Aim Controller and monitoring chat by peeking out of our headset every now and then. The stream will be starting at approximately 9:00 PM PT and we’ll aim to last for around an hour or two. We’ll be livestreaming directly to the UploadVR Facebook page for sure and if technology cooperates, we will be using Restream to hit YouTube, Twitch, Periscope, and Mixer as well. Either way, you can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:

Embedded livestreaming coming later at 9PM PT

You can see our most recent archived streams over on the UploadVR Facebook Gaming portal right here. In the future, we plan on moving back to Restream so that we can hit additional platforms again.

Let us know which games you want us to livestream next and what you want to see us do, specifically, in this or other VR games. Comment with feedback down below!

Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate.

For all you three million PSVR owners out there, Firewall Zero Hour releases in just a few hours later tonight. Specifically, servers are set to go live at 9PM PT (midnight ET) for release and if you pre-order the game, in addition to nabbing a few unlockables, you can pre-download the 21.6GB game file it so that it’s ready to go on the dot.

As far as we can tell, this is arguably one of, if not the, biggest launches the VR gaming market has seen thus far. Many of the biggest games across all headsets before now have been ports or adaptations in existing franchises, such as Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, Hellblade, and DOOM VFR, but Firewall Zero Hour is a brand new IP from a VR-focused studio in First Contact Entertainment with heavy backing from Sony as a publishers and in terms of pre-launch support and marketing.

Then on top of all that, it’s an online-only multiplayer-focused first-person shooter that’s been marketed primarily as using the PS Aim controller. While the overall genre itself (popularized by Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six, and others outside of VR) is a mostly untapped market for VR platforms, especially PSVR. Onward, Pavlov, and others are finding success on PC VR headsets when made by small indie teams, but First Contact is a studio of over 30 game industry veterans.

Since Firewall requires eight people to be online for its only real, non-Training game mode (4v4 multiplayer known as Contracts mode) there is a lot riding on its launch going smoothly.

So, the question is this: Is Firewall Zero Hour the most important VR game launch to date? Why or why not? What will its success or failure mean for the VR industry going forward?

View your surroundings while in VR via a customized virtual window to the real world. While disconnecting from reality has its perks, some things just can’t be accomplished from outside the confines of the real world. Whether it be eating, typing on a physical keyboard, or simply picking up real objects, that headset will eventually

iFixit revealed a full teardown of Magic Leap One Creator Edition recently along with some long-awaited clarity about how the system operates.

The teardown from iFixit credits Oculus founder (and former Facebook employee) Palmer Luckey with helping tear down the “Lightwear” glasses, which rely on a “Lightpack” processing unit that’s wired and worn on your side. Head on over to iFixit to see all the teardown photos or to Luckey’s website to read his review of the device. He also, by the way, suggests the headset sold fewer than 3,000 units so far.

The following illustration from iFixit breaks down the basic way the system functions as content flows from Lightpack to Lightwear:

Diving a little deeper, iFixit explains Magic Leap One uses color-specific waveguides to deliver visuals at two distinct focal planes, each composed of red-green-blue. This makes Magic Leap One a fixed multifocal display.

Not Exactly A Light Field Display

Don’t take it as a definitive guide, but the chart below shows a variety of display types for mixed reality as seen in a presentation by Facebook Reality Labs researcher Douglas Lanman at Display Week earlier this year.

Lanman’s presentation explained Facebook’s steps toward an opaque varifocal headset for VR. That’s quite a bit different from a see-through fixed multifocal headset like Magic Leap is using for AR.

In the chart above, you can see fixed focus headsets at the top. Those are the types of headsets we have today like HoloLens, Rift, Vive, PSVR, Daydream, and Gear VR. Fixed focus headsets usually fix your focus at a distance and render the environment and all digital elements at that distance.

From the chart above, a varifocal headset like Half Dome and a multifocal headset like Magic Leap One have something in common — they both depend on eye tracking to get digital objects to the right focal depth. Magic Leap One apparently decides on which plane to put content by flashing imperceptible lights into the corners of your pupil and measuring changes in the reflections.

Here are those lights as seen through a high-frame rate camera:

Tracking eye movements is not unique to Magic Leap. Apple bought SMI, one of the leaders in this area, and many other companies are exploring the technology with partners like Tobii. StarVR’s new ultra-high end commercial VR headset relies on eye-tracking to enable foveated rendering over an ultra-wide field of view and VRgineers’ enterprise XTAL headset uses eye-tracking to adjust IPD mechanically. If Facebook’s Half Dome ever makes it to market it likely will need eye-tracking too.

Optics And Eye Strain

Will VR and AR headsets be comfortable enough for most people to wear most of the day? The answer to this question may be related to the type of optical design used.

So far, most headsets from HoloLens to Oculus Rift and Vive Pro have been fixed focus headsets which struggle with the vergence-accommodation conflict. When you focus on digital objects that should be closer to you digitally, your eyes naturally want to point inward toward one another. Since the headset is focusing your eyes at a different distance the

The Beat Saber train just keeps on trucking. With its first arcade-powered tournament in the books it keeps flying off the digital shelves on Steam. There’s a robust custom song modding community already, the PSVR port is nearing release, multiplayer support tis coming, and people can’t seem to get enough of the energy sword-box-slicing fun. We’re even starting to see unabashed clones pop up. It’s a staple on my VR machine and one of the first games I put on for new users.

Now today, the official Beat Saber Twitter account tweeted a picture of a custom arcade machine setup created in partnership with SKonec Entertainment. The machine will make its debut next month at KVRF in Korea and GTI Expo in China, with more locations in Asia coming soon.

Here’s an example image of someone using the device (ignore the fact that she is facing the wrong way according to the footprints) spotted by VRFocus:

In the mock-up above and confirmed on Twitter you can see that the machines will be powered by Windows VR headsets rather than the Vive or Rift. Without knowing the reasoning behind the decision, I’d imagine flexibility of setup was a major determining factor since inside-out tracking makes it much easier to setup the unit wherever you want without needing to worry about cameras or lighthouses tracking. They’re also typically much cheaper.

Honestly, I could easily see something like this in a Dave & Buster’s right alongside Jurassic Park VR before too long. Fingers crossed.

Several developers around the world are all chasing the dream of delivering the first social VR MMO space to really hit mass adoption. Against Gravity have gotten close with Rec Room, but it’s less of an MMO and more of a VR lobby for multiple games and custom “rooms” for people to visit, similar to Altspace. High Fidelity, VRChat, Sinespace, and Sansar are all closer to the idea of what a de facto VR MMO hub might look like, while others such as Meta World are still toiling away in development. Now, Hypatia is about to enter the ring.

Today, TimefireVR are announcing that their persistent “virtual city” that’s “shaped by the imagination of its residents” named Hypatia is set to launch its full Grand Opening tomorrow, August 28th. It seems to garner inspiration from established principles in experiences such as Second Life and the aforementioned existing VR communities. Previously it was listed on Steam in Early Access with a price tag, but now the Grand Opening is shifting to a free-to-play model. You’re advised not to purchase that version since it will be free as of tomorrow.

Reportedly the developers have a major focus on the shared world experience rather than “isolated activities.” For example, “citizens” as they’re described can paint, sculpt, and animate art pieces, perform plays, take photos, and much more within the living world.

Instead of queuing up for a separate instance to partake in a mini game, you’d instead go visit a building inside the world that houses the activity. When you race boats between islands or visit zero-gravity shopping malls, you do so within the dynamic world.

With this launch there will also be several landmarks around the city that citizens are encouraged to explore, such as the Centrum main hub and social space, the Mango Shopping Story with lots of toys and tools, Sprite Park, thee Creative Art Studio, Theater Du Nul, and much more.

We’re waiting until launch to dive in for ourselves and offer hands-on impressions, but so far it sounds pretty similar to what’s being done in other social VR worlds. However, a major focus on keeping things dynamic and collaborative while specifically targeting VR could help set it apart.

Hypatia officially launches via its Grand Opening tomorrow, August 28th, on both Steam and Oculus Home for Vive and Rift and will also feature non-VR support. You can follow the game on Twitter and Facebook for more details.

Take a trip lightyears across the galaxy for a guided tour through five of TRAPPIST-1’s seven-planet system. Located approximately 39.6 light-years from the Sun somewhere in the constellation Aquarius, TRAPPIST-1, better known as 2MASS J23062928-0502285 for short, is a massive red dwarf star forming an exoplanet system composed of seven Earth-like planets. While too far